Archive for the ‘Harry A. Miller’ tag

Dale Bell and Charlie Glick might not have the same name recognition among auto historians as do Barney Oldfield and Harry A. Miller, but the duos do share something in common: Both conspired to build a car for competition, and both ended up with the Golden Submarine. But while the result of one collaboration is lost to time, the result of the other will head to auction this weekend.

According to lore, the inspiration for the original Golden Submarine came when Bob Burman, a racing friend and rival of Oldfield’s, died in April 1916 at the wheel of his open-cockpit Peugeot during a road race in Corona, California. Oldfield ostensibly felt that Burman would have lived had he been safely enclosed inside his car, with a safety cage around him.

Then again, in the spring of 1916, when Oldfield approached Miller, he was also in need of a new mount – his seven-year-old Christie front-wheel-drive race car was “ready for the scrap heap,” in his words – and Miller had just completed his first from-scratch racing engine, a lightweight overhead-camshaft 130-hp 289-cu.in. four-cylinder that would be capable of 120 MPH speeds.

Oldfield debuted the original Golden Submarine in June 1917 to much fanfare and some ridicule, but it would prove itself later that year when Oldfield took four out of seven match races from Ralph De Palma in a Twin Six Packard and when Oldfield proceeded to take down every AAA dirt-track speed record from one to 100 miles.

Later that year, however, Oldfield’s enclosed-cockpit idea nearly killed him when a fuel line ruptured in a crash at Springfield, Illinois, and the Golden Submarine’s single-door jammed. Oldfield fought his way out of the Golden Submarine, but from there on out raced the car in open-cockpit configurations. Though he retired from racing at the end of 1918, he held on to the Golden Submarine for a while longer, handing the wheel over to Waldo Stein and Roscoe Sarles.

Like Oldfield, Dale Bell had a penchant for racing – at least in the Great Race time-speed-distance rallies – and he called up Glick at Heartland Antique Auto Restorations in Paris, Illinois, in late 2005 asking him to build a car to run in the next year’s Great Race – something patterned after an old race car, but also enclosed to keep out the elements during the Great Race. “So I said you’re absolutely describing only one vehicle,” Glick said. “And that’s the Golden Submarine.”

Bell gave Glick seven months to complete the car, but he also handed over a basis for the build: a 1916 Chevrolet with a 171-cu.in. Chevrolet four-cylinder engine of the same vintage, already built for racing with dual SU carburetors.

Glick’s first order of business was to visit the Indianapolis Motor Speedway archives for photos of the original Golden Submarine, which he then took measurements from and scaled up to a little larger than the car’s original size. “I had to make it to fit a regular human, two actually – driver and navigator,” he said. “In those old photos, you see Oldfield really had to squeeze himself into the car.”

He then created a set of patterns for the body and began to hammer it out of sheet aluminum, the same material that Miller used for the original, laying the body panels over a cage of one-inch square aluminum tube, bent to shape. He fabricated both front and rear suspensions as well and adapted four-wheel hydraulic brakes to make it more roadworthy. Hidden headlamps and marker lamps make the car street-legal.

While Glick admits that it’s not as accurate as other replicas out there – Robert “Buck” Boudeman’s replica, for instance, has an authentic Miller engine powering it – he said he worked hard to engineer a measure of reliability into it that a perfect replica wouldn’t have. Indeed, while Bell dropped out of the 2006 Great Race with health issues partway through, he said that the combination of light weight, powerful engine, and favorable model year handicap made it competitive in vintage rallying. “It ran so good, it was almost like cheating,” he said.

The late historian Griffith Borgeson, a prime authority on early racing history, called Harry Armenius Miller “the greatest creative genius in the history of the American racing car.” The surviving examples of his work are among the most prized early American cars of any sort in existence. Next March, the Amelia Island Concours d’Elegance will mark the 90th anniversary of Miller’s first win at the Indianapolis 500 by including the spectacular racing cars among its feature marques.

At least a dozen early Millers are expected to be on the show field, the gathering organized in great measure by auction chieftain Dana Mecum, who now leads The Friends of Harry Miller. Miller cars and engines won the Indy 500 a total of 11 times. The fabled Offenhauser four-cylinder racing engine, which remained competitive into the 1970s, was spun off an early design for a Miller marine engine. Among the anticipated cars on hand will be the sole Miller V-16 known to exist.

The Amelia Island Concours d’Elegance will take place the weekend of March 8-10. For more information, visit AmeliaConcours.org.

* Steve Tremulis continues to share tidbits about the life and times of Alex Tremulis over at Gyronaut X-1, including some photos of the spoiler that Alex Tremulis – always concerned about aerodynamics – created for his wife’s Mustang. Could it have been the template for the spoiler on the Shelby G.T.350?

* David Greenlees at The Old Motor has been pulling together all sorts of information on the famed “round-door Rolls,” a 1925 Phantom I bodied by Jonckheere in the 1930s.

Harry Armenius Miller has often been described as the American version of Ettore Bugatti. The contemporaries both built cars that dominated racing in their time on their respective continents, both were engineering geniuses who pushed the limits of mechanical capabilities, and both even appeared to have studied each other’s work. So it’s only fitting that an early example of each man’s talent, the Miller TNT and a Bugatti Type 13, will cross the block at the same event, the upcoming Gooding Pebble Beach auction.

As is to be expected with race cars more than 90 years old, the histories of both the TNT and Type 13 are somewhat checkered. Miller and Leo Goossen designed the TNT in 1919 for brewer Eddie Meier, using a dual-overhead-camshaft 166-cu.in. four-cylinder engine – Miller’s first DOHC design, heavily influenced by Ernest Henry’s work at Peugeot. The TNT also featured a cast-aluminum body, ostensibly following the radical design of Miller’s famous race car patent (D55,070), which posited an automobile using monocoque cast-aluminum construction. While plans called for Miller to build two cars to enter in the 1920 Indianapolis 500, only one TNT is known to have been built, and it never raced. Instead, Maier placed it in storage after he lost interest in it, and its unique four-cylinder engine is believed to have been sacrificed to a World War II scrap drive. The body and chassis, however, turned up in the Harrah collection in the late 1970s and Miller collector Bob Sutherland restored the car with a later Miller 183 eight-cylinder engine. After Sutherland’s death, the TNT headed to the Christie’s Pebble Beach auction in 2000, where it sold for $193,000 on a pre-auction estimate of $200,000 to $300,000. Twelve years and much track time at Millers at Milwaukee later – and following what a Gooding spokesperson called “a sympathetic, $200,000 restoration” – it will return to Pebble’s auction scene with a pre-auction estimate of $750,000 to $900,000.

Bugatti photos by Pawel Litwinski, courtesy Gooding and Company

The Bugatti, chassis number 981, originally came from the Bugatti factory in August 1920 as a Type 22 with the famed single overhead-camshaft 16-valve 1,453cc four-cylinder engine and four-seater bodywork. According to Gooding, it remained in that configuration until after World War II, when it made its way into the collection of Weerte Ley, who had the chassis shortened to the length of the Type 13, Ettore Bugatti’s first race car, which famously finished the 1921 Grand Prix race at Brescia in first through fourth places. Chassis number 981 then went through a handful of other collections – including those of Benjamin Moser and Yoshiyuki Hayashi – until the current owner bought it in 1998 and had the dogcart-style body built and hand-painted to resemble the No. 13 car driven by Ernest Friderich to the win at Brescia. At the same time, Phil Reilly and Company restored the shortened chassis, original engine (number 538), original gearbox and original rear axle. The restored Brescia has since completed rallies in Europe, the United States, and Australia, and raced at the Monterey Historics. Gooding believes it will sell for $250,000 to $350,000.

Gooding’s Pebble Beach auction will take place August 18-19 at the Pebble Beach Equestrian Center. For more information, visit GoodingCo.com.

Perhaps it’s a little premature to call it “priceless,” because you can rest assured that by the end of the day on Saturday, July 9, somebody will have cut a weighty check for this piece of American racing history. It’s a perfectly authentic 91-cu.in. supercharged Miller straight-eight engine, from the collection of the late David V. Uihlein, founder of the Harry Miller Meet at the historic Milwaukee Mile, where Mecum Auctions will sell the engine.

The auction of Uihlein’s trove of Miller pieces, some of them irreplaceable, will take place throughout the weekend of July 8-9. It is even more rare for a complete Miller engine of this vintage to become available, especially at absolutely no reserve, as this one is. Miller stunned the racing world when he unveiled the tiny, screaming engine to meet a change in rules for championship-level racing. The little straight-eight had a gear-driven centrifugal blower and four valves per cylinder. Frank Lockhart used a Miller 91 to set a one-lap speedway record on the Atlantic City board track in 1927 that stood until Jim Hurtubise broke it in qualifying for the 1960 Indianapolis 500. There’s no official pre-auction estimate, but a six-figure guess for this is probably reasonable. Find out more about the sale, and the Miller Meet, at www.harrymillerclub.com.